No one's safe from their 15 minutes - even in the mountains between Iran and Iraq. Soon, instead of children working as mules sneaking goods across the border, children would be the smuggled items themselves, new moppets to star in that burgeoning Iranian export of recent years, the kid-in-peril genre film.

Before Jafar Panahi moved on to women and heavy-handed miserabilism with THE CIRCLE, he directed THE WHITE BALLOON and THE MIRROR, two deceptively simple films playing on the edge between innocence and experience. Majid Majidi tackled similar ground with less deftness first with THE CHILDREN OF HEAVEN then went full-on operatic with THE COLOUR OF PARADISE. Also eschewing simplicity for symbolism was Samira Makhmalbaf's THE APPLE, a docudrama gone extreme neorealist by using non-actors to re-enact an actual event in their lives.

They must've run out of children in the cities for we find Makhmalbaf in the mountains in BLACKBOARDS. Unfortunately, Makhmalbaf seems to have left lightness behind as well, morphing into that too-eager pupil who believes show-and-tell is an exercise in exhausting the possibilities; BLACKBOARDS is such a document on the exhaustion of a metaphor. Makhmalbaf gets marks for painstaking effort but none for the pain-inducing presentation.

Like BLACKBOARDS, A TIME FOR DRUNKEN HORSES feels not far removed from documentary. While in Western movies characters always find the perfect parking spot and pack helium in their luggage, here the loads the children carry on their back are too real and the skill with which they do it reveals much practice. But whereas BLACKBOARDS is overzealous, DRUNKEN HORSES is artistically lazy. It doesn't do much of anything. Ghobadi relies on audience discomfort over real kids in oppressive situations not far removed from their everyday lives but takes no risk in saying anything else. This may be the first kiddie labour porn

Seek out Abolfazl Jalili's DANCE OF DUST which has disappeared from my radar since TIFF '98. This is the brickmaker's GABBEH but sparer, forsaking dialogue but finding rich visual ones in its meagre surroundings. Brickmaking may be less visually appealing than carpetweaving but Jalili trusts its labouriousness and the rituals in its making to invest it with worth. Here, crow's feet already mark the face of a young boy working in the kilns but he earns even greater dignity by placing his handprint in the bricks. Such skilled economy is becoming a rarity, however, even in Iranian films.